Don’t Drive, He Said

Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing proposal

Michael Bloomberg has always favored grand schemes. Last week, on Earth Day, the Mayor stood in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life, beneath the blue whale, to lay out his vision for the city’s future. In an expansive speech, Bloomberg described a New York that would, in 2030, be both “greater” and “greener,” a city with nearly a million more residents, as well as cleaner water, new open space, and zippier transportation. This bigger, better metropolis would be a leader in combatting global warming; despite its increased population, the New York of the future would produce thirty per cent less CO2, resulting, as the Mayor put it, in “the most dramatic reduction in greenhouse gases ever achieved by any American city.”

The printed version of Bloomberg’s plan ran to a hundred and fifty-five full-color pages and contained a hundred and twenty-seven new initiatives. Just one of them—congestion pricing—got almost all the attention, much of it negative. The Mayor anticipated this—he referred to the pricing proposal as “the elephant in the room”—and his decision to include it anyway is perhaps the best reason to take the plan seriously.

The basic idea behind congestion pricing is simple: make motorists pay to use the busiest streets. Under the Mayor’s proposal, an invisible line would be drawn around Manhattan from Eighty-sixth Street south to the Battery. Vehicles crossing this line on weekdays between 6 A.M. and 6 P.M. would be charged a fee—eight dollars for cars, twenty-one dollars for trucks. (Those travelling only within the congestion zone would pay half price, while taxis and livery cabs would be exempt.) The fees would be assessed electronically and could be paid either with a toll pass or over the phone or the Internet.

Driving crosstown for lunch is an easy, if maddening, way to appreciate the scheme’s logic. The impression that one could walk—or at least trot—just as quickly is borne out by the numbers; according to data collected by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council and analyzed by Bruce Schaller, a Brooklyn-based consultant, the average speed achieved by a vehicle travelling along Forty-second Street between the hours of 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. is 4.7 miles per hour. On Thirty-fourth Street approaching the entrance to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the average speed drops to 2.5 miles per hour.

A few cities have tried congestion pricing, most notably Stockholm and London, and in most cases it has been a success. Stockholm imposed congestion pricing on a trial basis last year; the program worked so well that voters opted to reinstitute it. Since the London plan was introduced, in 2003, vehicle speeds in the city’s central business district have increased by thirty-seven per cent and carbon-dioxide emissions from cars and trucks have dropped by fifteen per cent. The plan, which the newpapers initially derided as “Kengestion”—after its main supporter, London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone—has grown increasingly popular; in 2004, Livingstone was easily reëlected, and now nearly two-thirds of Londoners say that they back the scheme. Just three months ago, the congestion zone was expanded westward to include most of the boroughs of Ken-sington and Chelsea and Westminster.

The case against congestion pricing is often posed in egalitarian terms. “The middle class and the poor will not be able to pay these fees and the rich will,” State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, of Westchester County, declared after listening to the Mayor’s speech. In fact, the poor don’t, as a rule, drive in and out of Manhattan: compare the cost of buying, insuring, and parking a car with the seventy-six dollars a month the M.T.A. charges for an unlimited-ride MetroCard. For those who do use cars to commute, eight dollars a day would, it’s true, quickly add up. And that is precisely the point. Congestion pricing works only to the extent that it makes other choices—changing the hours of one’s daily drive or, better yet, using mass transit—more attractive. One of the Mayor’s proposals is to put the money raised by congestion pricing—an estimated four hundred million dollars a year—toward improving subway and bus service.

Meanwhile, it’s naïve to suppose that congestion isn’t itself costly. Sitting in traffic, a plumber can’t plumb and a deliveryman can’t deliver. The value of time lost to congestion delays in the city has been put at five billion dollars annually. When expenses like wasted fuel, lost revenue, and the increased cost of doing business are added in, that figure rises to thirteen billion dollars. The question, Bloomberg observed, is “not whether we want to pay but how do we want to pay?”

Many elements of the Mayor’s plan, including congestion pricing, will require approval by the state legislature, which is too bad, since, as a recent Times editorial put it, Albany is a place where good policies generally “go to die.” Even Governor Eliot Spitzer, who, as state attorney general, sued the country’s largest carbon emitters, offered what can only be described as a tepid endorsement of the Mayor’s proposal, saying, “We look forward to reviewing the plan.”

As a matter of city planning, congestion pricing is a compelling idea; in the context of climate change, it is much more than that. Any meaningful effort to address the problem will have to include incentives for low-emitting activities (walking, biking, riding the subway) and costs for high-emitting ones (flying, driving, sitting at home and cranking up the A.C.). These costs will inconvenience some people—perhaps most people—and the burden will not always be distributed with perfect fairness. But, as the Mayor pointed out, New York, a flood-prone coastal city, is vulnerable to one of global warming’s most destructive—and most certain—consequences: rising sea levels. If New Yorkers won’t change their behavior, then it’s hard to see why anyone in the rest of the country or, for that matter, the world should, either. The congestion problem will, in that case, find a different resolution. Who, after all, wants to drive into a city that’s under water? ♦